The system uses the Xbox 360's shiny new Kinect accessory and open-source libraries. (Source: Engadget)

Now why didn't Microsoft include THIS with its Kinect bundle

It's
frustrating to always watch films like The
Minority Report and Iron
Man II
where characters zip through their ultra-productive days,
leveraging exotic
interfaces that perform the toughest tasks and ease.
And they even look cool using these visualizations to boot. But
when the movie light fades, you're off to your car with its boring
old dash display and probably will greet work the next day in front
of the same boring old UI.

Using ROS ("an
open-source, meta-operating system for your robot")
and libfreenet ("a
lower-level API for sending and receiving messages over a Freenet
connection, and for reading and writing raw data streams"), and
an off-the-shelf Xbox 360 with Microsoft
Kinect, MIT researcher Garratt
Gallagher has created a system similar to The
Minority Report's
hand driven GUI.

The Microsoft Kinect can "see" the
position of your fingers and palms, allowing you to control your
floating GUI with ease. You can resize images, move them
around, spin them, delete them, scroll down a list of images, or
relegate images to a special tray in the demonstration.

There's
probably a few questions on your mind now. First, why didn't
Microsoft think this up in the first place? Well, give the
folks at Microsoft some credit for designing as impressive a piece of
hardware as the Kinect -- that made life for Mr. Gallagher a whole
lot easier. But hopefully Microsoft does take note and decides
to scoop up this idea and add it to the default Kinect bundle.

Your
second question might be, how did this MIT researcher come up with
such a intriguing GUI? Well his creation is perhaps less than
surprising, given that the design team for The
Minority Report and
other typical futuristic flicks are full of MIT alumnis. For
example The
Minority Report leveraged
the talents of MIT Media Lab alumnus John
Underkoffler and former MIT architecture dean William
J. Mitchell.

"The Space Elevator will be built about 50 years after everyone stops laughing" -- Sir Arthur C. Clarke